I've been meaning to point out this column by David Warren, who's stuff is always very good. It just dawned on me that I can use it to further explain my post yesterday on the controversy at the Toronto Film Festival.
A big quote follows (emphasis mine):
A great advantage of this Christian worldview -- on which our State and nation were founded, and which was once taught in our schools and upheld in law -- was its internal coherence. The greatest minds through twenty centuries had thought through the legal implications, but more profoundly, "discovered" layer behind layer of morality, written into nature. There is a moral order in the world, a law behind human law, and indeed all the "great religions" allow that good is good, and evil evil. Today, none of this is possible, for Christian or any other religious reasoning is ruled out of court, and all judgments must stand or fall on "pure reason". Which is a problem, because pure reason is no more apparent than God or the human soul. Which is to say, absolutely obvious to the eyes of faith, and otherwise invisible. The removal of the postulated God and human soul from public philosophy thus leaves a system of legal reasoning that makes no sense. We have, in effect, a worldview that makes "demonization" illegal, but cannot acknowledge the defining demon. Meanwhile it invents new crimes, and forgets old ones, while flailing about in the de-oxygenated chamber of "pure reason". There were many random directions we could have gone, after the supply of oxygen was cut off, but the one we seem to have hit upon is to define "crime" as belief in the existence of crime itself. The worst human deed is now to demonize something -- a person, group, practice, object, whim, or ... anything at all.This is exactly right. We are now headed to a place where we have to defend finding a discussion of cat killing offensive, even evil (The film "Casuistry" at the Toronto Film Festival). We have to defend wanting to keep children away from adults who want to drug them and molest them (Robin Sharpe). We have to defend the notion that Criminals should not be allowed to threaten members of the public while in jail (Mark Emory). We have to defend these positions anew because we can't seem to allow ourselves to use tradition as a defense anymore. This is not to say that changes are not possible, but any science student knows that in an experiment you alter only one variable at a time. Otherwise there's no way to follow the chain of causation. Not that science is a model for social issues anyway. Controlling the variables on a society wide scale would involve coercion beyond toleration and (thank goodness) our abilities. Tradition means evolved solutions to social problems. The idea that we can think up "perfect" solutions is childish, reckless and dangerous. Change must be evolutionary, not revolutionary, or we risk not knowing up from down. We run the of risk having to re-build the wheel, if we can.
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